Jacobin

11 25?

February, at the start of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, news broke that a group of military contractors was circulating a blueprint for mass deportations, to be carried out by private contractors.

Led by Erik Prince, Donald Trump ally and founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater, the group proposed (among other ideas) that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) create a “skip tracing team” that would send out private contractors to hunt down immigrants targeted for deportation, per reporting at the time by Politico.

Now, there are indications ICE is carrying out those plans.

Last month, the Lever revealed that ICE had signed a $7 million contract with defense contractor SOS International for “skip tracing services.” SOS International, also known as SOSi, has long done business with the federal government, including working with the US military in Afghanistan — and has business ties to one of the military contractors whose name was listed alongside Prince’s in the proposal.

It was the first time, per online federal procurement databases, that an ICE contract description contained the phrase “skip tracing,” a term usually associated with debt collection and bounty hunting. There was little further detail about the services SOSi would provide to Trump’s immigration enforcers.

The contract — with its eerie callback to the Prince deportation blueprint — appears not to be a fluke. Several days later, ICE signed another “skip tracing” contract, this time worth up to $33.5 million, with international debt collector Global Recovery Group LLC.

Then, on Friday, October 31, as the Intercept first reported, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau, the agency’s primary deportation arm, released procurement documents that mapped out new plans to create a bounty-hunting program that would deploy skip tracing methods. Though the documents are preliminary, ICE’s proposed program hews closely to the blueprint drawn up in February by Prince and his cadre of military contractors.

Under the program, private contractors will deploy “all technology systems available” to locate ICE’s targets, the documents say. Contractors would be given a list of ten thousand names at a time and be allowed to ultimately locate “up to 1,000,000” individuals, per the records.

ICE already has plenty of technology at its disposal to identify and track down immigrants, an arsenal that the agency is furtherbuilding out now that it is flush with cash. But the “skip tracing team” appears distinct in that its mandate would include sending out privately contracted bounty hunters to systematically identify immigrants’ residences and workplaces.

The bounty hunting program would include “performance-based incentives” — cash bonuses for vendors who successfully hunt down immigrants for ICE. This cash payout idea appears to be pulled directly from the Prince memo, which suggested that ICE build out a “bounty program which provides a cash reward for each illegal alien held by a state or local law enforcement officer.”

To judge from ICE’s first skip tracing contracts with SOSi and Global Recovery Group LLC, which are together worth over $40 million, the program will prove yet another gold mine for the military contractors clamoring for their cut of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar immigration spending blitz. And that makes sense: it was drafted by those same vendors.

From Blackwater to Bounty Hunting

The core message of Prince’s deportation plan was this: If President Donald Trump wanted to carry out his stated goals of mass deportations, he couldn’t do so alone. “The government,” the plan said, “should enlist outside assistance.”

Although Politico did not publish the complete text of the proposal, what has been made public from the document indicates that Prince was making the suggestion as part of the “special entity” 2USV, a group of defense contractors. (An LLC with the same name has been registered in Wyoming, but many details about the project remain unclear.)

The contractors include former Blackwater employees like Bill Mathews, the company’s former vice president, who pleaded guilty to violating firearms records law related to his work at the mercenary firm, as well as Richard Pere, former head of a Blackwater aviation subsidiary. Most of the Blackwater alumni have not been formally associated with the company in years. Blackwater has gone through a series of acquisitions and name changes since Prince sold the firm in 2010; its latest form is the private security conglomerate Constellis, which still operates the flagship Blackwater training center in North Carolina and is now trying to “drive strategic growth” in its border-operations work.

So far, there are no clear ties between Prince’s current business ventures — including Vectus Global, a murky security firm that is sending drones and mercenaries to the Haitian government — and the vendors now inking deals to carry out ICE’s new bounty-hunting program. But at least one other contractor involved in the initial proposal has business ties to the companies that have been tapped to carry out the plans.

Louis Gobern, one of the names listed in the initial Prince memo, is currently the president of Resilient Logistics Services & Solutions, a defense contractor that advertises its work with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The company names SOS International, ICE’s new skip tracing contractor, as an “industry partner,” and both companies have previously worked as subcontractors on the same Customs and Border Protection contract.

SOS International has been vying for Department of Homeland Security contracts in recent months, poaching one of ICE’s top intelligence chiefs, Andre Watson, in August. The company boasted that Watson, who helped run the ICE program targeting students for political speech, would help the contractor “expand its business and deliver capabilities to the federal and state law enforcement agencies.”

When Politico contacted Mathews, one of the former Blackwater executives, about the proposal in February, he claimed he had heard nothing from the Trump administration about moving forward with the bounty hunter program.

“There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the government, and we have no reason to believe there will be,” he said.

If ICE’s recent multimillion-dollar spending spree is any indication, that is changing.

This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

an 6 23

Justice Samuel Alito's billionaire donor's hedge fund, Elliott Management, plans to dispute a new set of financial regulations that were created to combat fraud, Jacobin reports.

This comes after the justice's Wall Street Journal op-ed ran earlier this week "in what appeared to be an effort to preempt" a "ProPublica report that raises questions about Alito's failure to recuse himself from a case involving hedge fund magnate Paul Singer, as well as allegations that Alito failed to 'list certain items as gifts' on his 2008 financial disclosures."

Using a Supreme Court decision supported by Alito, according to the report, Elliot _{suggests}_ "the rules are unconstitutional, and could ultimately try to bring a case before Alito to strike down the new regulations if they are enacted."

Alito wrote in the WSJ op-ed, "ProPublica has leveled two charges against me. First, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose [sic] Report."

Per Jacobin, "Elliott’s efforts to weaponize a recent Supreme Court case to block anti-fraud rules — and to potentially use the high court to kill them — spotlights how judges are in key positions to help billionaires who provide them with gifts and other largesse."

According to the report, an attorney for Elliott Elliott said, "This would pose an existential threat to the activist investor’s business model."

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Axios

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May 26, 2021

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/voter-suppression-capitol-riot-chamber-commerce

major corporations won praise in the weeks after the January 6 Capital riot by expressing support for voting rights and promising to suspend their political action committee donations to Republican lawmakers who had tried to overturn the election. Corporate America would be a vanguard in the defense of democracy, some headlines suggested.

Left largely unmentioned: brand-name corporations and corporate lobbying groups still funneled $15 million last year to two major GOP groups — the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Republican State Leadership Committee — after the organizations and their officials pushed to curtail voting rights and overturn the 2020 election, according to IRS records we reviewed.

Meanwhile, many major companies continue to support the US Chamber of Commerce — even as the powerful lobby group has been leading the fight against federal legislation protecting voting rights.

RAGA Rakes in Cash

In November 2020, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) backed a Supreme Court amicus brief requesting that the high court prevent Pennsylvania election officials from counting mail-in ballots postmarked on election day.

The brief alleged that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had opened the door for “unscrupulous actors” to “attempt to influence a close Presidential election in Pennsylvania and elsewhere” by granting a three-day extension for ballot counting because of problems with the COVID-19 pandemic and US Postal Service delays.

A month later, Texas Republican attorney general Ken Paxton brought suit to withhold the certified vote count from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin ahead of the Electoral College vote on December 14, on the grounds that the states had violated the Constitution when they changed their election rules to make accommodations for COVID.

Supporting Paxton’s lawsuit were the Republican attorneys general from seventeen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. The group filed an amicus brief in the case. All but one of RAGA’s executive committee members at the time — Georgia attorney general Chris Carr — were represented among the signatories.

Amid those brazen attempts to overturn the national election, forty-seven companies and trade associations donated nearly $1.5 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association in December 2020. Several of the donor companies have subsequently claimed to support voting rights.

For instance, Philadelphia-based international law firm Cozen O’Connor signed the well-publicized “We Stand for Democracy” letter against voter suppression laws in April. Yet the firm funneled $50,000 to RAGA weeks after the group tried to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the election in Cozen’s home state of Pennsylvania.

Other signatories to the letter that also gave to RAGA in December were PayPal ($50,000) and Lyft ($25,000).

A number of companies gave to RAGA in the days immediately after it filed the brief. Those include Johnson & Johnson ($50,000), PepsiCo ($25,000), U.S. Sugar Corporation ($15,000), and Microsoft ($25,000).

Walmart, which would later decline to sign on to a letter pledging support for democracy and voting access, gave $125,000 to RAGA in late December. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, meanwhile, gave $15,000 to RAGA in December, only to pledge three weeks later not to give PAC donations to the lawmakers who voted against accepting the Electoral College results.

Soon after the money flowed to RAGA, the group helped direct people to the January 6 protest preceding the Capitol insurrection through its dark money arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF). RLDF appeared on the “March to Save America” website and even made robocalls promoting the protest that eventually resulted in the storming of the US Capitol building.

“The March to Save America is tomorrow in Washington, DC, at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m.,” the calls stated. “At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com.”

Since then, Republican attorneys general backed by RAGA have continued to try to make voting more difficult. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, for example, urged states with Republican legislatures to tighten their election laws in March.

“There are certain states where we still control legislatures and we still have governors,” Paxton said in an interview with Breitbart. “I would encourage them to work with the legislature in those states and make sure that their laws are tightened up.”

Meanwhile, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich has been fighting to uphold restrictive voting laws, claiming to do so in the name of “election integrity.”

“There is a whole menu of options of how people can exercise their right to vote. Nobody is disenfranchising anybody in Arizona,” he said in February. “This litigation is all about, ‘Can we protect the integrity of our ballots?’”

The laws — the first invalidating ballots cast in the wrong precinct; the second banning third-party ballot collection, or “ballot harvesting” — were challenged by the Democratic National Committee, which argued that they had a discriminatory impact on racial minorities that connects to a history of discrimination in the state.

In January 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the laws down on the grounds that they violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership to minority groups.

As the case headed to the Supreme Court, Brnovich dismissed Democratic complaints that the laws would disproportionately impact minority voters, claiming that “they always play the race card.” The case is ongoing.

RSLC Scores Millions After Trying to Restrict Voting Rights

In the months before the election, another GOP group, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), filed a Supreme Court amicus brief pressing justices to uphold Arizona’s restrictive voter laws. If the court sides with the GOP, the decision could gut the main remaining enforcement mechanism in the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“RSLC submits this brief in support of Petitioners because the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, if allowed to stand, will significantly undermine the ability of states to safeguard election integrity and maintain voter confidence, and will cause paralyzing uncertainty as to the continued validity of innumerable facially-neutral time, place, and manner election regulations,” the June 1, 2020, brief reads.

More than two hundred corporations and trade associations gave RSLC nearly $13.7 million after the organization filed its brief, according to data compiled by CQ Roll Call’s Political MoneyLine. Some of the biggest donors included BNSF Railway ($280,000) and Dominion Energy ($170,000).

Health insurance giant Centene Corporation contributed $250,000, while Anthem chipped in $50,000. Pharmaceutical companies continued donating, too, including Novo Nordisk ($125,000), Novartis ($60,000), AbbVie ($50,000), and Gilead Sciences ($50,000).

Fossil fuel companies ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips both gave $100,000 to RSLC. Tech money poured in as well, including donations from Google ($25,000), Uber Technologies ($25,000), PayPal ($25,000), and Amazon ($10,000). Other corporate names, like Bank of America and Best Buy, each donated $25,000 to RSLC. General Motors chipped in $10,000.

Some of those same corporate donors signed the “We Stand for Democracy” letter last month, including Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Bank of America, Best Buy, General Motors, and PayPal.

The RSLC is now encouraging state legislatures to purge voter rolls, change voter registration deadlines, and enact new voter ID requirements, as *Documented* recently reported.

The Texas state house is currently considering a bill that would close polling locations primarily in Democratic and minority areas. In Harris County, for example, thirteen of the twenty-four House districts — all represented by Democrats — would lose polling stations. Texas isn’t the only state aiming to restrict voting rights. According to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states.”

“Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law,” the report continues. “In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).”

Julian Brookes, a spokesperson for the Brennan Center, said that the “vast majority” of those bills were introduced by Republicans.

Both RAGA and RSLC are due to next report their election filings in July.

Breaking Up With the Chamber

In the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and in the face of ongoing Republican efforts to restrict voting rights, political watchdog Accountable.US has started a new campaign asking companies, including Microsoft, Target, and Salesforce, to disaffiliate from the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s preeminent business lobbying group, on the grounds that the Chamber has been bankrolling the GOP’s anti-democratic agenda.

The Chamber’s long history of complicity and enablement of Republican assaults on voting rights is documented in a recent report from Accountable.US. The report notes that in 2010, the Chamber, joined by Republican strategists, “hatched” and funded REDMAP, the notorious GOP redistricting project focused on flipping state legislatures ahead of the 2010 census.

REDMAP was so successful that Republicans picked up nearly seven hundred state legislative seats in 2010, flipping twenty chambers. After that, the project focused its efforts on redrawing congressional and state legislative districts to favor Republican majorities. Through REDMAP, the GOP was able to gerrymander a standing majority in the House that held until 2018, despite losing by 1 million votes in 2012. Even in 2018, in at least three states, the GOP held its congressional majority despite a majority of voters selecting Democrats to represent them.

Beyond REDMAP, the Chamber and its affiliated entities have been major funders of RAGA and RSLC, giving the groups a combined $13.6 million since the 2016 election cycle, based on data from Political MoneyLine. It has also contributed to Republicans who support cracking down on voting rights.

The Chamber is currently waging a campaign against H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which is the Democratic Party’s response to Republican voter suppression laws.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/19-vaccines-were-made-possible-by-socialism-and-years-of-public-sector-funding-journalist/

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The coronavirus pandemic has had its deadliest days yet in December 2020, but the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and others offer hope that life might start returning to some degree of normal in 2021. Journalist Leigh Phillips, in an article for the democratic socialist website Jacobin, praises the arrival of the vaccines but expresses strong concerns about the ways in which they will be distributed.

"A jaw-dropping marvel of science, economic planning and selfless, humanist cooperation by thousands of researchers around the globe, the development of this and other vaccines hot on Pfizer's heels has taken a mere nine months since the discovery of the disease, rather than the years or even decades such medical research and development (R&D) normally takes," Phillips explains. "They offer a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian, rationalist world could produce and achieve, freed from the fetters of profit."

Phillips argues that the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna shouldn't be hailed as a "triumph for capitalism," as the companies relied heavily on "years of public-sector funding." The companies, Phillips notes, "relied on state shepherding and bankrolling of the vaccine development process."

Phillips adds that distribution of the vaccines will underscore the harsh inequalities in the U.S. and other countries.

"Before we get out the champagne and toast our genuinely heroic scientists and clinicians," Phillips writes, "we have to recognize that while these vaccines are indeed a light at the end of a very long tunnel, that same tunnel will be yet longer than it needs to be, thanks once again to the irrationality, inefficiency and injustice of capitalism. It will be especially unfair for those in the developing world — and even in many poorer, less populous parts of the developed West, there will be cruelties for those who live outside the metropolitan core, as there already have been throughout 2020 in the United States especially."

Phillips wraps up the article by stressing that the public sector will be crucial in fighting future pandemics.

"Looking beyond the horizon of COVID-19, the threat of future pandemics — and among them will be ones nowhere near as forgiving as this coronavirus — requires, at some point, a serious discussion of how global democracy can be constructed from the bottom up, and how in such a democracy, worldwide economic planning can tame the inefficiencies, irrationalities and injustices of markets," Phillips writes. "Because no one is safe until we are all safe."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

CAP-AND-TRADE / CATO INSTITUTE / CLIMATE / CLIMATE CRISIS / DENIALISM VS NIHILISM / FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM / LIBERATARIANISM / PEAK INDIFFERENCE / REALITY HAS A WELL-KNOWN LEFTIST BIAS / STATE CAPACITY LIBERTARIANS

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/libertarianism-climate-change-environment-private-property

The decline of libertarianism — also known as propertarianism — has inspired a lot of discussion in the past couple of years. The economist Tyler Cowen recently disavowed the label, affirming his commitment to a modified version of the philosophy that he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism.”

Cowen’s defection continues the exodus of intellectually serious figures from the libertarian milieu, most notably to the so-called liberaltarian Niskanen Center. Both Cowen and the Niskanen cohort have stressed the failure of mainstream libertarianism to formulate an honest response to the climate crisis.

Free-Market Environmentalism: Theory and Practice

When the issue of climate change first received serious attention in the 1990s, for a time it looked set to establish common ground between environmentalists and libertarians. There was much interest in the concept of “free-market environmentalism” or FME, drawing upon the work of British economist Ronald Coase, who had suggested that environmental problems could be resolved through the proper allocation of property rights. Terry Anderson of Montana State University exercised a strong influence in these debates.

FME’s key proposal for addressing climate change was the creation of tradable emissions permits, a model that had been successfully deployed in the case of sulfur dioxide emissions. According to this view, a market in permits would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions, as long as there were appropriate limits on the volume of permits.

Most environmental activists greeted the idea of “rights to pollute” with suspicion: they argued for more direct controls, as part of a broader shift away from mass consumerism. But many were won over by the prospect of forming an effective coalition to press for decarbonization. By the time of the Kyoto conference in 1997, support for carbon prices as the most cost-effective long-term solution, to be implemented through internationally tradable permits, had become the dominant view. Twenty years later, this vision is finally being realized in the European Union, where high permit prices are driving coal-fired power out of existence.

Trading Places

But a funny thing happened on the way to Kyoto. Propertarians, who had often been keen on tradable permits as long as environmentalists opposed them, now rejected the idea with near unanimity, along with the rest of the political right. Since then, we have faced a paradoxical situation where they consider any kind of market-based solution to climate change unacceptable. Why did this happen?

The problem was to some extent philosophical. Propertarian thought relies heavily upon the Lockean fiction that property rights arise naturally, before the emergence of a state (defined broadly to include any kind of authority within a group, tribe, or nation). Obviously, no such rights could have existed when it came to the atmosphere, so emissions permits would have to be the creation of national governments working through global agreements. Admitting that states define and enforce property rights was too big a pill for many propertarians to swallow.

But the cultural barriers standing in the way of free-market environmentalism were even greater. Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning. Environmentalists who insist that untrammeled individualism of all kinds has malign consequences lie at the opposite cultural pole.

However, this created a dilemma for propertarians. Having rejected both state- and market-led solutions to climate change, their only remaining option was to deny that the problem existed at all. This required tremendous intellectual dishonesty, supplied in large measure by hired guns who had won their spurs in earlier fights over passive smoking and the ozone layer. This didn’t trouble the libertarian ground troops, who clung tenaciously to their baseless self-image as the smartest guys in the room. Lacking any scientific, economic, or statistical knowledge to back up their opinions, they seized upon the innumerable talking points that the denial industry churned out.

All-In for Trump

Then Trump came along. He grasped — indeed, embodied — the reality that abstract notions of personal liberty were not what really appealed to the conservative base. Rather, it was the conviction that well-off white men should be free to think, speak, and act as they pleased, while the state clamps down on everyone else when they step out of line.

At the same time, two decades of climate change denialism fostered a nihilistic and crudely partisan attitude toward basic questions of truth or falsehood among conservatives. Trump substituted barefaced lies for the ponderous apologetics of the intellectual right, starting with the claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s.

After Trump’s election, the “libertarian moment” so widely touted just a few years ago gave way to a sudden collapse, with most of the movement’s intellectual leadership shifting in the opposite direction. Republican politicians seen as potential leaders of the future, such as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, went all-in for Trump, along with advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. The only exception was Michigan’s Justin Amash, who quit the Republican Party in 2019 and now faces almost certain defeat, sharing the fate of a handful of state-level Republicans who departed to join the Libertarian Party.

The remnants, clustered around the much-diminished Cato Institute, have no obvious way forward. The institute finally abandoned climate denialism last year, but it still has no answer for the climate crisis. The last remaining cheerleader for the “libertarian moment,” Nick Gillespie, offered a rather slippery response to Tyler Cowen’s criticism:

Whatever your beliefs and preferences might be on a given issue, the scale (and cost) of addressing, say, climate change is massive compared to delivering basic education, and with the latter at least, there’s no reason to believe that more state control or dollars will create positive outcomes.

On close inspection, Gillespie is just restating the standard libertarian view on education, while saying nothing at all about climate change, other than to acknowledge that it is a massive problem. He neither denies that “more state control or dollars” are needed, nor offers any alternative.

Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.

Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Quiggin, an Australian economist at the University of Queensland, blogs at Crooked Timber.

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